Given that the United States is engaged in the occupation of two countries, has a thousand bases spread across the globe, and its military budget is seven times that of its nearest competitor, it is clear that the anti-war movement of the past decade has been a profound failure. Though the majority of Americans are now against the wars, the movement has been dismally unable to translate those attitudes into a change in policy. Much of this failure, I believe, can be attributed to its inability to craft and communicate a realistic and specific alternative vision to the present order in which the American people can have both peace and security. Instead, for the most part, it has been a weak and reactive opposition that, at best, acts as a damper on the worst excesses of the American empire. While better than nothing, the chances of such a movement to achieve the peace its advocates so urgently desire is effectively nil.
Further damage has been caused by the aggressive exploitation of this deficiency by the advocates of foreign policy interventionism. While acknowledging the preferableness of peace as an ideal, such people commonly counter the anti-war position by observing the reality that there are bad people in the world who want to kill us. “How,” they inquire, “do peace advocates propose we deal with that situation?”
An extremely common anti-war response to this critique is that the “desire to kill us” has its origins in our own interventionism; for instance, by bombing a village to kill a terrorist leader, we initiate a cycle of violence by radicalizing the residents of the village who lost friends or relatives. Though true, this argument suffers from the fact that it is an abstract assertion: we can speculate on the effects that an action today will have on tomorrow, but we can never be certain. By contrast, the interventionist argument is concrete: there exist, now, people who want to kill us, and it is more important to respond to what is than it is to respond to what could be. Continue reading →
American Socialism for the Rich
The Anti-War Movement and the Militia: Providing for the Defense of a Free Society
Given that the United States is engaged in the occupation of two countries, has a thousand bases spread across the globe, and its military budget is seven times that of its nearest competitor, it is clear that the anti-war movement of the past decade has been a profound failure. Though the majority of Americans are now against the wars, the movement has been dismally unable to translate those attitudes into a change in policy. Much of this failure, I believe, can be attributed to its inability to craft and communicate a realistic and specific alternative vision to the present order in which the American people can have both peace and security. Instead, for the most part, it has been a weak and reactive opposition that, at best, acts as a damper on the worst excesses of the American empire. While better than nothing, the chances of such a movement to achieve the peace its advocates so urgently desire is effectively nil.
Further damage has been caused by the aggressive exploitation of this deficiency by the advocates of foreign policy interventionism. While acknowledging the preferableness of peace as an ideal, such people commonly counter the anti-war position by observing the reality that there are bad people in the world who want to kill us. “How,” they inquire, “do peace advocates propose we deal with that situation?”
An extremely common anti-war response to this critique is that the “desire to kill us” has its origins in our own interventionism; for instance, by bombing a village to kill a terrorist leader, we initiate a cycle of violence by radicalizing the residents of the village who lost friends or relatives. Though true, this argument suffers from the fact that it is an abstract assertion: we can speculate on the effects that an action today will have on tomorrow, but we can never be certain. By contrast, the interventionist argument is concrete: there exist, now, people who want to kill us, and it is more important to respond to what is than it is to respond to what could be. Continue reading →
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